Why Leaving Academia Feels Like Losing Yourself
Grappling with losing the version of yourself that took years to build.
When someone asks me what I do nowadays, I oddly still start with the past tense: “I was a college professor, and now I am a writing coach for scholars.”
Even now, a year and a half after leaving my tenure-track position, I lead with what I was doing before I can say what I do. It’s like I need to establish my credentials before I can claim my present. As if “writing coach” doesn’t mean anything without “former professor” in front of it.
I'm glad I left academia when I did, and I haven't regretted it for an instant, but I'm still figuring out how to navigate my identity outside the ivory tower. And I’m learning that this disorientation isn’t just about updating my LinkedIn profile or learning new professional skills. The challenge is untangling a decade of identity formation that happened so gradually I didn’t realize how tightly I’d wound my sense of self around my scholarly work.
Today I’m sharing another post in a series about leaving academia. You can read the introductory one here. So many academics in the US are reeling right now. The politics of this moment have put academia under attack, and scholars are facing impossible decisions about whether to stay or go. Outside the US, other institutions are facing budget cuts because capitalism keeps insisting that we can do more with less. Some are choosing to leave because of these conditions. Others are being forced out. Many are caught in that painful middle space—not sure if they can stay, not sure if they can leave.
If you’re considering leaving academia—whether by choice or because circumstances are forcing your hand—you might be wrestling with the issue too. It’s not just about finding a new job. It’s about losing a version of yourself that took years to build.
Let me try to name some of what makes this so hard.
When Your Discipline Becomes Your Home
I called myself a feminist media scholar very early in my career. That label did more than signal what I studied—media. It announced a political allegiance and connected me to a particular community of scholars: feminists who study media. This identity produced a particular language, a way of seeing the world, and immediate kinship with people I’d never met. We shared idioms, heroes, methods. We knew the same literature. We cared about the same injustices.
For many of us, our disciplines tie us not just to research questions but to what we value most broadly in life and society. In my case, that meant attention to inequalities of gender, race, sexuality, and other differences. This commitment extended far beyond my scholarship. It shaped how I moved through the world, what I fought for, and what I taught my students to notice and challenge.
When I left academia, it felt like I was exiting a conversation I had worked so hard to join. Not just losing a job, but losing a home. A place where people spoke my language and shared my commitments. Our belonging attaches to communities of practice, not to payroll. Which means the severance goes deeper than a resignation letter can capture.
The Prestige I Don’t Want to Admit I Cared About
Here’s what I never really wanted to admit outloud: I liked being an expert. I liked being sought after. I liked winning awards in my field. I liked being known. People contacted me for my expertise in women’s sports media because my name was attached to the University of Washington or the University of Texas. To leave the latter institution felt like I was losing some of my credibility. Like I would somehow matter less without a university of that caliber behind it.
I’m now building a work life as a writing coach, and I genuinely love this work. It’s a helping profession that fulfuills me in other ways. But it’s different than having your status backed by an institution. And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wrestle with the loss of prestige that came with my position as a professor.
CV gold stars are highly field-specific. Outside the academy, those signals become invisible or misunderstood. The careful accumulation of publications, grants, invited talks, teaching awards—all the metrics I’d spent years building—suddenly required translation. Or worse, didn’t travel at all. It destabilized the simple self-statement: “I’m a professor.” It forced me to construct a new narrative about my career. I’m focusing my work less around “who I am” and more around “who I serve,” which is both disorienting and invigorating. I'm also orienting my identity less around work in general.
And if I’m really honest? Part of me grieved the loss of that scoreboard. When your performance is constantly being measured through publication, grants, and citation counts, it’s easy to read every acceptance or rejection as a verdict on you, not just on a piece of work. The knot between outcome and self-worth gets pulled so tight you don’t realize you’re wearing it until you discover you can take it off.
But taking it off is also freeing in ways I’m still discovering.
The Sunk Cost That Kept Me Up at Night
I worked so hard to get through grad school. So hard to land a tenure-track job. And so hard to be on track for tenure. None of these are easy tasks. To abandon all that work felt like I would lose so much of what I had worked for. All those years. All that training. All that specialization. All those years of earning potential lost on low-wage assistantships and precarious employment.
The sunk cost wasn’t just about time or money. It was about the story I’d been telling myself about who I was becoming. I had established myself in that identity. I’d done the work. And then I had to ask myself: Was I staying for the right reasons, or was I staying because I couldn’t bear to let go of the investment?
This is what happens when you spend years in a system with bottlenecked hiring channels and hyper-specialization. You develop a single, over-defined story about yourself: “I’m an academic.” Any path that diverges from that story starts to feel not like a lateral move, but like a loss of self. Like you’re throwing away the only version of yourself that matters.
Now, instead of "throwing it all away," I see my career shifts and turns as an evolution. None of those years are lost; they are instead a chapter among many.
Leaving Your People
One of the hardest parts of leaving was knowing I was stepping out of thick, everyday communities where my identity had taken shape. Meetings, seminars, conferences, peer review—those weren’t just professional activities. They were the rituals through which I understood myself. Without those audiences, without those rhythms, the self can feel unmoored.
I still miss my colleagues. I miss my students. I miss the texture of academic life—even the parts I used to complain about. And here’s what surprised me: I didn’t just grieve the people. I grieved the version of myself that existed in relation to them. The person who walked into a faculty meeting and knew her role. The person who could say “my department” and “my students” and feel the weight of belonging those words carried.
When Your Work Feels Like a Calling
For many of us, teaching and research isn’t just a job—it’s a moral project. Knowledge as a public good. Teaching as transformation. Research that addresses systemic inequalities and works toward change. When you’ve treated your work this way—as a calling—leaving can feel less like changing careers and more like betraying a purpose. The dissonance is ethical as much as it is practical.
I had to wrestle with this for a long time. Could I still pursue justice outside the academy? Could I still contribute to knowledge without institutional backing?
The answer, I’ve learned, is a resounding yes—but getting there required me to separate my values from the structure that had held them. I began to see myself as a scholar and intellectual instead of just an academic.
[Prolific cultural stuides scholar,] Stuart Hall did not hold a PhD, despite spending much of his career in academia and being a prolific scholar. He saw academia as merely a job that paid him to do intellectual work. He was famously critical of the institution and avoided tying his scholarly identity too closely to it.
I have been redefining myself as a scholar and intellectual rather than an academic, and the experience has been both difficult and liberating.
What I’ve Learned About Identity
My identity has indeed shifted after leaving academia, but I oddly still introduce myself with the past tense first. I still feel the phantom limb of institutional affiliation. But I’m clear now about something important: The work I care about—helping people write, think critically, and challenge injustice—doesn’t need an institution to give it meaning. The identity I built as a scholar wasn’t really about the university. It was about the questions I asked, the communities I built, the students I taught, and the values I enacted. Those things can travel. They are traveling with me now.
Leaving can feel like unraveling. The routines, the titles, even the email signature—gone. But what remains is not nothing. What remains is you: the thinker, the builder, the question-asker. Your employer didn’t make those qualities; it only gave them a temporary container. You carry them forward now, into whatever you build next for yourself.
And yes, it’s brutally hard to believe that when you’re in the middle of it. When you’re watching colleagues celebrate getting jobs or tenure while you’re quietly updating your resume. When you’re trying to explain to your parents why you’re walking away after they watched you work so hard. When you’re lying awake at night wondering who you’ll be without this identity you’ve spent a decade constructing. I see you. You’re not alone.
The transition wasn’t smooth for me either. The identity work took time. But I’m on the other side now, and I can tell you: The work I do now feels more aligned with my values than working for an institution mired in conservative politics and capitalistic exploitation. The meaning I once attached to institutional belonging has shifted to something more portable, more mine. Being my own boss means I can move throughout the world as I see fit.
If you’re in that painful middle space right now—considering leaving but feeling stuck, grieving what you might lose, questioning whether you can survive the identity shift—I want you to know that the ground does stabilize eventually. You’ll find your footing. The untangling takes time and patience with yourself, but on the other side, you’ll discover that your identity was never really about the university. It was always about what you brought to it. And you get to take that with you.
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